Blogging and RSS make the event

neville

Ian Betteridge, Technovia: Demo is getting a vast amount of attention because [there] are a vast number of bloggers there, all pouring what must amount to thousands of words onto the Internet about it. I don’t know what the organisers have done to encourage this, but there’s a lesson for a lot of companies – if you’re having a conference, encourage live blogging.

Absolutely spot on, Ian. I’d not heard of DEMO until I started seeing posts show up in my RSS feed, starting with Renee Blodgett’s then Robert Scoble’s, and then the floodgates opened. Thankfully there’s BloggingDEMO.com – an indispensable blog to keep up with the volume and keep track of what’s going on! Plus DEMOletter, the event blog itself.

We saw similar things with two conferences just last month – live blogging, and lots of follow-up posts, from the Blog Business Summit in Seattle and the New Communications Forum 2005 in Napa, California.

If I were organizing a conference right now, at the very top of the list of communication channels that I’d be thinking about in my communication planning would be blogs and RSS. Yes, I’d also be thinking of all the traditional ways to communicate – the website, the press releases, the flyers, etc – but top of my list are the new media channels.

And not only blogs and RSS purely from the conference organizer’s viewpoint – I’d want to ensure that the ‘blogging infrastructure’ is such that anyone who attends can just go right ahead and blog, wherever and whenever they want. That primarily means wireless network availability so you can just fire up your laptop, get connected and away you go. I was a presenter at the Napa event, and we had that infrastructure (well, except when it rained and the internet got wet: teeny inside joke there…).

There can’t be any doubt that this new way to get people talking and buzzing about your event – not only the formal stuff but also the informal, chit-chat type things that happen: see Renee’s blog for examples – has no parallel. It is the most effective way to rapidly spread the word.

6 thoughts on “Blogging and RSS make the event”

  1. Hi Neville,
    I agree that blogs and RSS are a key for any high tech conference. Something that I thought was interesting about the Blog Business Summit was that many of us agreed to use the same Tags for the event. This was a way for us to bind our posts, pictures and Del.icio.us tags together for reference. Their were actually two: BBS05 and BlogBusinessSummit.
    I wonder if this is something that conference organizers should promote- a specific tag for an event. It takes away from the emergent quality a bit, but it may help.

  2. That’s a great, idea, Lee. Adds to the ease of tracking and finding the information. So if you have a blog that Technorati will tag automatically by its categories (TypePad, for instance), you just create the category for the posts. Couldn’t be simpler.
    I’d also say that all of this applies to any conference, not only high tech ones. The easier it is to do, the more likely this will be one other factor that will help extend this new way of creating, sharing and reporting information into the broader business world.

  5. Neville:
    BloggingDEMO.com came about because Jason and I both ended up going to DEMO and we cooked up a way to blog the event live. What DEMO *did* do was extend press credentials to a large number of bloggers. What Chris Shipley and the DEMO staff did *not* do was discourage any of us from blogging the event (and in fact gave us a shout out or two during the event). We sat right up front, filmed, photographed, and wrote about the entire event in real time. In addition to me and Jason doing BloggingDEMO, Scoble, Buzz, Cameron Reilly, and a host of other bloggers were typing away madly.
    Next year, I guarantee you there will be even better provisions made for bloggers. And you’re right – every event organizer has a lesson to learn here.

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